


Nor Is My House Now My House

by xaara



Category: The Expanse (TV)
Genre: Childbirth, F/M, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-17
Updated: 2018-12-17
Packaged: 2019-09-20 23:51:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,492
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17032290
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/xaara/pseuds/xaara
Summary: Charanpal dies. Chrisjen plants a garden. Something is born.





	Nor Is My House Now My House

**Author's Note:**

  * For [rocknlobster](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rocknlobster/gifts).



> While I did not tag this "Major Character Death" since I don't think one can argue that Charanpal is a major character, the story explores the immediate aftermath of his death.
> 
> I am pretty loose about warning/tagging for things outside the AO3 Archive Warnings. Please contact me if you'd like more information before you approach this story.

After the two men left, she stood alone in the kitchen. The glasses of water she had offered untouched. The countertops shining. The half-carafe of coffee. Dishes from breakfast in the sink. Arjun liked to wash them by hand. An extravagant use of water, but water used once here would be used again soon, far away. He would wash them when he returned from his long walk with Avi. Usually just in time for lunch. The sun a javelin through the windows, flat with morning, laying long shadows.

There, on the counter, her hand terminal. She had promised the men she would call; named a mother, a husband. What do you say? What had they said? _Deputy Assistant Under Secretary-General Avasarala._ The whole goddamn list. No one bothered with the whole list. _You should call someone. Do you have someone to call._

She stepped onto the porch. The house locked behind her. She turned back to the door, suddenly, frantic. She felt something in her chest like a butterfly struggling to escape its chrysalis. _The struggle is important,_ they always said; _without the struggle, the butterfly is too weak to fly._ Such bullshit, such pointless cruelty, that to ease something’s birth meant its death. Her heart ripped at its shell. Was the struggle there important too? Or was it instead important to stay in the shell, in the safe shell, sheltered, a soup of potential without the agony of becoming. _In the light of the moon a little egg lay on a leaf._ Or perhaps there is no potential without becoming, no kinesis without first the climb, the trembling balance at the peak.

What was—the door, the door. It recognized her, opened smoothly for her: _friend._ Inside, on the sideboard, next to her father's figure of Atlas. The frame was awkward, cumbersome to open. Her fingers slipped against the catch. Scrabbled again, slipped, _fuck_ , caught. She thought she might say something. Instead, she tucked the print into her blouse. She wanted to fold it into her body. Inside where it would be safe, among the things flexing out of their shells, among the struggling things. An un-birth.

 _Is she nearby,_ they had asked. _When will he be back._   _Ma'am._

She had offered them glasses of water, and they had not touched the glasses, and when they had gone the glasses began to sweat and left circles of condensation on the table. Why had they not touched the glasses? Had they known not to eat or drink; had that been a condition of their descent to meet her?

Outside, then, again. Out through the gate. The smooth permeable concrete underfoot. Straight forward. Her body moved. What is it that acts? Protons, neutrons, electrons do not act. Cells, perhaps, in encoded, determined ways. What is it that laughs? What is it that—

Down the driveway. The tall spread of the pines to either side. Two hundred meters along the road, past the neighbors. The door here opened for her, too, but not especially for her. For anyone. For all. Right. Inside. _Can I help you._

“Yes,” she said. “I need material. Seven raised beds.” She was not sure of her voice, but the salesperson waved his hand and said, “Right this way,” and walked as if expecting her to follow, so she thought she must have spoken.

“What are you going to plant?” asked the salesperson, and she said, “I don’t know yet. Something that will grow,” and the salesperson said, “Do you need soil,” and she said, “I need everything,” and the salesperson said, “You’ve come to the right place. We’ve got everything you need. Seeds and everything. Tools, whatever. Hey. Woah, hey, do you need to sit down for a minute?” and she said, “I do not fucking need to sit down. Show me what I asked for,” and the salesperson said, “Okay, okay, all right, over here, ma'am,” and did.

—

The salesperson—his name was Raúl—charged the purchases to her account. The name: _Chrisjen Avasarala_ on the screen. Another name— No. “Can I help you get them to your vehicle?” he asked

“I’m walking,” she said. She had not considered this. It would take several trips. But it wasn’t far; she could take the long beams of the garden boxes first. Perhaps borrow a wagon for the soil. The shop must have a wagon for this sort of thing.

“Ms. Avasarala,” he said, “please allow me to help you home.”

He was perhaps twenty-five. A child. Someone’s child. So lucky, to have gotten an education, a job. He grew things, and taught others how to grow things.

“We’ll need a wagon,” she said. “For the soil.”

He nodded, and went about fetching one. They worked in silence, carrying first the beams of the garden beds, the hardware, the screws and brackets. She had insisted on these: physical things to hold the beams together. “But ma’am,” Raúl had said, “there are much faster—” and then he had stopped and said, “Okay.” And so now there were beams and hardware. Screws. Simple machines. The better part of three thousand years old and yet there was still no better way to draw two pieces of material together, transform one force into another.

“Do you have a drill?” he asked as they stood in her yard, surveying the beds-to-be, the bags of soil, the hand trowel and cultivator, the packaged seeds, the stakes and twine and cages. Her sari clung to the sweat on her back, under her arms. Inside, a photograph. Still there. She felt the sharp edges of it against her skin, like claws, testing.

“Ma’am?”

“No,” she said. Perhaps Arjun had one. It seemed like the sort of thing a man ought to have, sitting cobwebbed in a corner, hinting at architectural aspirations.

But Raúl nodded and said, “I’ll be right back, then,” and left.

Some time passed. Sol swung up into the sky, shortening the shadows from cadaverous spindles into silhouettes: a tree, a chair, a long blade of grass that had evaded the last mowing. Raúl returned with the drill. His hands fit the bit into the chuck. Sure hands, with short fingernails, wide knuckles.

“Where do you want them set up?” he asked.

“You don’t need—” she said.

Raúl looked up. His eyes were like stones: smooth and blank, from some unmeasured time. She had thought him a child, but he was not a child.

“Here,” she said. “Over the grass.”

—

Raúl had finished the beds, helped her move them, and started the lining and filling by the time Arjun returned. She heard his laughter from the other side of the gate. Avi was telling some story, probably, some feat of daring generously embellished. Avi had freewalked once, gone out an airlock unsuited, tethered at the waist. The night he told the story, Chrisjen and Arjun and Avi had finished a good bottle of whiskey between them, and she had showed them how to twist out the window and onto the roof. They had gone all three of them together, giggling in the muted way of children trying to avoid attention, and laid on the roof to watch bits of rock and ice and old satellites fry in the  atmosphere.

“I miss space,” said Avi.

Arjun grunted in the manner of a man who disagreed but wasn’t going to say so. Chrisjen rolled her eyes and disagreed for them both: “Space is a refuge for limp-dicked bottom-feeders who have something to prove and no one to prove it to.”

“You’ve never touched it,” said Avi, too old a friend to be baited into the argument. He stretched his arms toward the sky. “I’ve touched it. It’s the most amazing thing. You can’t— You can’t undo it.”

She had almost made a joke about that— _you’ll be losing your virginity any day now_ —but then she had looked at Arjun and he had a thoughtful expression on his face, like he was considering what a life lived with that touch might have been like. “Why did you? Touch it?” she asked instead.

Avi thought for a long time before he answered. She thought he might have fallen asleep. “It called,” he said quietly. “There was always something between us, a skin or film that I couldn’t break. Sometimes it was metal or glass, and other times it was as thin as a suit—something a knife could have gotten through. But at the end of the day, I was up there, but I was never _there._ Like working in the ocean without getting wet, or farming without touching the plants. I needed to touch it with my hands.”

Arjun grunted again, this time in understanding, and she thought, _Men, so fucking ridiculous, always thinking they have to touch things to understand them._ Like ancient ornithologists, shooting the objects of their devotion out of the sky. Offering themselves up in turn: _take me, kill me, fuck me, love me back._

In the mesosphere, part of the universe that had been traveling for 13 billion years caught an unlikely gravitational pull and burned and burned and was gone.

—

She had sent Raúl away before she told Arjun, and then afterwards they huddled in the yard among the torn-open bags of soil and held one another.

“I made him go,” she said.

Arjun said, “He had a choice.”

“Not much of one.” It hadn’t been much of one. Service for opportunity. The same path she had followed, the one set by her father and grandfather before her. She thought: _paths end._ They hug rivers until the rivers meet the sea, twine through forests until they tangle in brambles or emerge into cities. We think of this as _land_ , but really it’s _island._ Walk far enough, and there is no farther to walk.

_Honorably._

Charanpal had died, they said, _honorably._

As in: not a coward. As in: well. As in: quietly. As in: with his eyes open.

She closed her eyes. The earth pressed up against her, everything falling, crushing. The ripping again, at the core of her. She thought: _I could cry._ But there wasn’t anything there. What is a chrysalis that has burst open? Just an empty room, that once held something magical. An empty skin, inside which nothing will ever fit again.

“Arjun—” she said.

“Hush,” he said.

“I—” she said, but there was nothing there either, just the singular subject. “They said it would be months. Until he’s— Until they can get the body back to Earth.”

“I see,” said Arjun. They sat like that for a time, until he said, “This is awful for my back,” and then, more quietly, “We need to make calls. Make— Arrangements.”

“Of course,” she said, and gathered herself, and rose.

—

“We issue a statement,” said Admiral Kihara, his hands flat on the table in front of him. “Avasarala makes the statement. A mother, a high-ranking UN official. We disavow violence, no mother should lose her sons, could have been prevented by going through the proper channels, and so on.”

Chrisjen examined her hands. They were wrinkled, but so far had avoided the liver spots that had hounded her mother. Perhaps a manicure was in order; the last one was showing its age. There was dirt under one fingernail, from the garden.

“We can’t just issue a statement,” said Under Secretary-General Makoare. He shook his head, pointing at the screen, the catalog of the dead. “We lost six Marines and an intelligence operative on Callisto. If we issue a statement, we grant the insurrection legitimacy. We honor it as—”

Kihara cut her off. “We’re not _honoring_ the insurrection by acknowledging it. It happened! People _died_.”

Makoare shook his head again. “No. I know people died, but _no._ If we speak as though the OPA is more than just a scattered collection of Mars-funded malcontents and unionizing miners, the OPA will _become_ more. It’s bad enough we have a mob of angry children throwing rocks at each other on a moon. We can’t let them become an army. Acknowledging terrorism encourages it.”

She'd thought the room would be larger than this, had imagined it larger. The situation room. She’d been invited only once before, and it had turned out that her presence in the peninsula had been more important than her presence in a cramped, windowless room in the UN. There was coffee in the corner, burnt and bitter. Creamer, sweetener, cheap sugar-glazed pastries, three battered apples. The space could have belonged to a middle school.

“Not to mention,” Colonel Silvestri said, “it fans the flames with Mars. They started a scuffle. We can be bigger than that. We can back off. Call it a lesson learned all around, send a backchannel warning that they’d better not try it again or—”

“Or what?” Makoare said. “We’re not their grandmother: _I’m not angry, I’m just disappointed._ It’s a test. They want to see what they can get out of poking us. The OPA’s just the stick. Today it’s six Marines keeping the peace on Callisto, tomorrow it’s annexing an asteroid or intercepting ships in Jupiter Fleet.”

Kihara snorted, an undignified sound. “It brings a new meaning to burying our heads in the sand when we’re burying them in a whole planet.”

“We’re not burying our heads,” said Makoare. “We’re taking the high road. Mars bit off more than it could chew, and now we have the opportunity to be magnanimous.”

“And speak entirely in fucking clichés?” asked Chrisjen.

The room went silent. “There’s no need for that language,” said Kihara.

“There's every need for that language. You want me to get up in front of a camera and play the distraught mother, the UN official whose son was murdered on a moon so far away she hasn’t even gotten his body back yet.” She swallowed. Her throat spasmed, clenched. She wanted a cup of the bitter coffee, something to do with her hands. “Maybe a little garment-rending for veritas. ‘Does this sobbing woman make our dicks look bigger?’”

Kihara shifted, looking at Makoare, then said, “That’s not—”

“That’s _exactly_ what you want me to do. You want me to stand on a platform and weep. I'd show some baby pictures and talk about how my son was a perfect child, torn from my bosom too soon. It’s posturing. If you want to shame Mars, shame Mars. I’m sure they’ll tattoo their sorrow on their faces or whatever ridiculous bullshit Martians do when they can’t publicly scapegoat someone for a failure. But Makoare is right. This doesn’t have to be a war unless you’re determined to fuck over the men and women who died not to make it one.”

She thought, suddenly, of blood. The way it felt, clotted and raw, slick as oil, the warm scent of it. There were predators who could smell blood through the water, wafting through the air, who could stalk that scent to its origin to find what was wounded. They moved silently through the trees or slipped among the currents.

The thing in the chrysalis chewed at its cage.

Makoare was saying something, and Kihara’s face held at least three sentences he wouldn’t dare say, his rank having been bestowed but not earned, and Silvestri looked down at the table and then up at Chrisjen. Chrisjen let herself smile the gentle smile that did not reach her eyes and stopped her nephews in their tracks. She smelled blood, the pheremonal burst of fear.

“I believe we’re done?” she said. The others stopped talking. She could hear their heartbeats in the quiet, like quivering rabbits. Like fish in a net, darting again and again into the tangled weave while the winch pulled the net slowly into the choking air.

—

She planted lettuce. Kale, spinach, chard. Arjun said, “When did you become a health nut?” and she said, “Be useful or fuck off,” of which options he chose the latter.

She planted eggplants. The packets of seeds showed the promised fruit: long purple eggplants and round green ones, eggplants with zebra stripes and ghost-white skin.

She planted rows of mint and of basil, coriander, ginger, galangal, paprika. Chiles, fennel, mustard.

She planted radishes, and they grew almost immediately, pushing pairs of heart-shaped leaves up through the soil.

She planted carrots and watched their feathery tops stretch towards the sun and culled the weakest ones.

Raúl brought tomatillo seedlings and sunflower seeds and tiny pots of lavender. He turned the lavender upside down to empty it out of the pots, and loosened the roots with fingers that gentled each branch root from the tangle and shook it free. Chrisjen was awed at it, as she had been watching her mother knit. Her mother’s hands had flown so quickly she had never been able to teach Chrisjen the skill. The knitting had been a part of her, like the cloth had simply grown from her fingertips, and Chrisjen watched Raúl urge plants to root themselves into the earth and knew he grew things from his fingertips too.

She planted beans below tented poles and peas along the base of a trellis and tomato seedlings in the center of cages. Later that night, she woke up and couldn’t breathe. _No,_ she thought, _no, no, no._ She tied her robe around her and opened the door to the garden and tore up the tomato cages. One of their thin metal legs caught at her calf, tearing the skin. Arjun looked at her quietly when she came back inside, and sat on a low stool while she sat on a kitchen chair, and dabbed away the blood and said nothing. She took heaving breaths. In, and out.

—

The body arrived on a Tuesday.

Perfectly preserved. He had died honorably. As in: not gruesome. As in: the important pieces of him were still attached.

The men who offloaded him at the port said, “Ma’am,” and they carried the box gently, but really they needn’t have. It was just a box with a dead thing inside.

She gave the men the directions and then she thought she might sit for a moment. He had been shot, they said, in the heart. From behind. It was quick, they said. He would not have been afraid.

Had his heart held what he would become? No way to tell, now. Now, just a thing.

—

“Thank you,” she said to Lakshmi. “Thank you,” to Gerard. “Thank you,” to Azizi and Casimir and Maura.

Yes, he was. Yes, very brave. Yes, we’re holding up. Yes, Arjun and I have both been working. Yes, we have all we need.

The girl he’d been seeing, there in the corner. Chrisjen should probably talk to her. They had barely known one another. Probably waiting until the relationship was something more before they met the parents. She thought she should say something kind and dismissive, ask how the girl was handling things, offer— What? Condolences, so sorry for your loss.

She smiled until she thought: _I am going to rip the face off the next person I have to smile at._

Excuse me, I need a moment. Excuse me, I’ll be right back. Behind her: _Poor thing._

She found Franklin in the garden. He was examining the pea trellis. A few vines still clung to the latticework, stubbornly resisting death even though they had already fruited, completed their purpose.

“Bubbles,” Franklin said, and hugged her.

“God _fucking_ damn it,” she said in response, laughing a little.

“Nothing like a good funeral to make you wish you were dead,” he said.

Something was crawling in her throat, screaming. She thought that if she opened her mouth, other people might hear it. She swallowed it instead, felt it clutch at her. It fought, lost, sulked. It burrowed into its den. It had shed its skin there and already the skin was so much smaller than the crawling thing that the thought of it having ever worn the skin was laughable.

Franklin looked at her, sideways. “Craig couldn’t make it,” he said. “I told him you’d hate every minute anyway. We’ll come visit soon, when things are more settled.”

She nodded. “He’ll be cremated tomorrow,” she said. “His directive said he wanted the ashes scattered along the lunar corridor.”

Franklin made a humming sound. “They’ll burn up, eventually,” he said. “It’s quite the exit.”

“Cremated twice,” she agreed. “Nothing straightforward was ever good enough for that child.”

They walked to a bench and sat. For a time, neither spoke. “I would never have wished this for you,” Franklin said eventually. “When your father— We had a conversation, several months before he was— He knew it was possible his work would not end well. He asked me to look after you.”

Chrisjen blew out an amused breath. Franklin chuckled. “I know. I told him as much. And although I respected that man as much as I’ve ever respected anyone, I didn’t follow what turned out to be his last request of me. I haven’t looked after you. Not that you would have let me, of course, but—” He twisted his hands together in his lap. “I don’t know what it is to lose a child. But I imagine what it would be to lose you and I can only even come at the thought from an angle.”

The screaming thing had gathered itself again. It paced its boundaries.

“Thank you,” she said. “I’m holding up.”

—

There was a boy in the garden. A man. No, a boy— _and that is how one becomes old,_ she thought. He stood very straight and very still, as if cast in place. His eyes were dark and glazed, like the eyes of an animal in the darkness, reflecting the glow of a flashlight. She revised his stillness from _statue_ to _cat._ Pressed the button on the inside of her bracelet, drew her sleeve down over it.

“Who the fuck are you?” she said, equal parts opening salvo and delaying tactic.

He twitched, minutely. “I’m good with my hands, ma’am,” he said. “I thought I might—”

“If you’re looking for work, it’s not here,” she said. “Try the employment agency.”

He ran a hand over his head, through close-cropped hair that stood up at strange angles. “I’m not— I’ve got a job. I just thought—” He looked at her, glanced away. His hands moved like moths, never settling. His mouth dragged down at the corner, then flattened. “I just thought,” he said quietly, “that I could help. Do something.”

He stood bowed by some weight she couldn’t see. Or could see, but only in reflection—in the hunch of his shoulders bearing up the sky. “Can you weed?” she asked, finally.

“Just tell me which ones to pull,” he said.

She walked to the closest bed, pointed at the soil. “Pull the vines,” she said. “Untangle them from the other plants first or they take everything with them, assholes that they are.”

He knelt. Bent his head. She felt, for a moment, the strange urge to lay her hand on the back of his neck. It would be warm, she thought. Strong. She would be able to feel his pulse. She could notch the muzzle of a gun into the juncture of skull and neck, and he would bow further. She could pull the trigger.

When the security guards arrived, dicks firmly in hand, the boy had unthreaded a vine from the seed leaves of a zucchini plant, his hands quick and gentle and calloused in places that she recognized and places she didn’t. She waved the guards off. They looked appropriately shamefaced as they left; heaven help her if someone dangerous ever showed up.

She watched the boy again. _Dangerous_ , she thought. He was dangerous, but not to her. Standing beside him was like standing next to a falcon. The food chain made it unnecessary to worry, unless one was a particular kind of rodent, a small bird, something soft and vulnerable.

She was not soft or vulnerable, or all her soft and vulnerable places had been armored over, set with pikes, jigsawed with battlements. Inside the gate was a thing, with teeth. She crouched beside the boy and reached for another vine, the sort that might grow between bricks, pull stones from walls. Caught early enough, they came out of the earth with a simple tug.

—

Makoare called her in. “Chrisjen,” he said, gesturing towards the couch in his office. “Drink?”

She nodded, accepting the tumbler of scotch he poured and taking a polite sip.

“I’ve heard good things about your work in Operations,” he said. “That incident on Pallas cemented it, of course, but even before.”

“Thank you,” she said.

He cleared his throat. His hands, she noticed, were gripping his glass more tightly than was quite necessary. The fingertips had gone white. “You—and your family of course—are an incredible asset to the UN.”

She felt the claws as they slid out, smooth and silent. “Let me help you: I’m loved by some, feared by all. Impeccable fashion sense. Never a hair out of place. Always file my reports on time. Rarely take sick days.” Makoare looked startled. She liked that about him: the improbable, impossible innocence.

“Chrisjen—”

“Are you finished blowing smoke up my ass, or should I add boarding-school posture and doesn’t shit where she eats—”

“ _Chrisjen._ ”

She stopped. The claws kept their tips hooked, playing.

“We’re— _I'm—_ asking you to take a leave, followed by a promotion,” said Makoare. “There are things— There are things I can’t share with you, involving the aftermath of Callisto. We’re handling it, but it would be easier to handle if you weren't in the mix at Operations, for just a little while.”

“A little while—”

“Six months. At the most.”

“And easier to handle—”

Makoare set down his glass and leaned forward. “Come on, Chrisjen. You’re the smartest person in this godforsaken place. Don’t play dumb.”

“If I don’t?”

Makoare pinched the bridge of his nose. “It’s not a request,” he said finally. “I talked some people down from a forced resignation. You mentioned loved by some and feared by all but you left out the contingent that would happily burn you at the stake.”

“Oh come now,” she said. “No need to regress millennia. I’m quite content simply being burned in effigy.”

He shook his head. “Six months. And a promotion. You’re loved by some, and right now they’re loud and powerful. Take it.”

She tipped the rest of the scotch into her mouth and swallowed. She felt a rough-hewn, feral joy at the burn. “Six months and a promotion. I want an office so beautiful it makes Admiral Kihara cry into his barracks.”

“Done,” said Makoare.

“Reassignment to general Earth operations.”

“Done.”

“This is the easiest fucking negotiation I’ve overseen in twenty years,” she said, and stood. The claws sheathed. She held out her hand to shake.

—

The garden had become a tangle of growing things. She added more beds. Raúl came with hoses and talked about irrigation and superabsorbent polymers until she said, “If you say the word _drip_ one more goddamn time, I will call friends who operate prisons so secret the moons they’re on don’t know they exist,” and Raúl, who didn’t fear her nearly as much as he should have, said, “I’ll set it up next week, then.”

In the mornings, she worked on the garden, and in the afternoons, she worked in it. Arjun had brought out a chair comfortable enough to suit his temperamental hips and read out loud as she worked or silently after she told him his history of Luna was enough to make even the hardiest plant wilt from boredom.

The girl called. Charanpal's— The girl. She left messages that Chrisjen didn't watch, though Arjun watched them and sometimes wept. She thought Arjun might be meeting her, but she didn't want to— There was nothing there.

Sometimes, the boy came to work. He worked silently and methodically, and refused to eat or drink or even take vegetables as payment.

“Thank you, ma’am,” he said. “Yes, ma’am,” he said.

“If I didn’t know better, I’d say you were programmed by a particularly sycophantic employee of mine,” she said, and his eyes sharpened just enough. She smiled, satisfied.

—

Once, the boy showed up bleeding sluggishly from a cut over one eyebrow.

Once, the boy showed up with his arm in a cast.

Once, the boy showed up and sat down to prune tomatoes and fell asleep. Arjun noticed it first and went inside to get a blanket.

Chrisjen woke him as the sun set, keeping the planter between them as she called. As she had suspected he might, he flailed upon waking, grabbing for a gun that wasn’t at his side.

“Dinner’s inside,” she said. “Arjun made parathas.”

“I need to go,” he said.

“Bullshit,” she said. “You don’t have anywhere you need to go.”

He looked like he might argue, but she hadn’t raised a child and brokered peace accords by shrinking from argument. “Come inside,” she said, with a mildness that surprised her. She walked away. He followed.

—

They ate and complimented Arjun’s cooking, and then she took the boy down the hall and into the study. They sat there together, drinking more than was probably wise. Arjun looked in on them, smiled, and said, “You’re going to regret this tomorrow.”

Chrisjen felt pleasantly untethered. “Probably,” she said. The boy laughed.

“I’ll leave you two to it,” he said. “And I’ll put the trash can by the bed.”

Left to it, the two of them drank silently. The room smelled like old leather, like paper and glue. Ordinary things, indulgences. She’d moved the picture of Charanpal in here, to her desk, along with the statue of Atlas that had spent so long beside it she couldn’t quite imagine them separated. The boy’s eyes slid to the picture. Lingered there longer than chance.

“How did you know him?” she asked, and he jumped, the lines of his body drawing tight. The flicker of his hand toward something sheathed.

“Know who?”

She rolled her eyes and poured herself another drink. “For someone in Intelligence, you aren’t acting the part.”

“I don’t—”

“Cotyar Ghazi,” she said. “My friends have friends have friends who really ought to know more about keeping their mouths shut. Or did you think I let every passer-by nap in my garden?”

He inclined his head, raised his glass slightly. _We are known to each other,_ she thought. “How did you know him?”

Cotyar leaned back in his chair, letting his elbows drop over the overstuffed arms. An elaborate display of relaxation, gathering time, shoring up the lie. “We didn’t really know each other. Met maybe once or twice at a UNN function. I thought you looked familiar.”

She thought she had been prepared for the lie, but found, abruptly, her tolerance had vanished. “Do I strike you as particularly dim?”

“No ma’am.”

“Then know that is the last time you will ever lie to me in my house. Try it again and the friends who informed me of your position will inform you you no longer hold it.”

“Yes ma’am.”

They sat quietly again. He turned the glass in his hand, fingertips tracing the rim. Finally, he said, “I can’t give you details.”

“Of course not. I’ve been at this game since you were skinning your knees on the schoolyard.”

He took a breath, let it out slowly. “We met a few years ago. A little while after he joined. They thought about him for Intelligence, did you—? Of course you know that. Stupid question, sorry. Decided the Avasarala name was too much of a liability, too much potential for blackmail or leverage over you. Sent him into the Marines instead.”

She nodded. “Go on.”

“It wasn’t— We weren’t close. We were friendly. Got drinks a couple of times, talked. Played pool. He was really bad at pool.”

He had been. Astonishingly bad.

“Anyway, we both wound up on Callisto. Different reasons. Different— Different missions. I had to— I made a choice.” His voice broke. His hands were steady. She thought: _This, too, is a kind of lie._

—

On the day he was born, Charanpal kicked so hard she thought he had broken one of her ribs. “If I am pregnant _one more goddamn minute,_ ” she told Arjun, and felt the first cramp spread through her like a fist, dragging at her viscera.

People had described it as pain, but it wasn’t pain. It transcended pain. It was a place wholly in her body and unlike her body as she had ever known it. She drank offered water and paced the room like a caged tiger. She made sounds, low sounds from her belly, from someplace deeper, from some part of her she hadn’t known existed, or maybe hadn’t existed until now.

The doctors smiled and introduced themselves and asked questions, and she made low sounds and Arjun said, “I love you, I love you, I am so proud of you,” and the rest was flashes: moving, restlessly; swaying on her elbows, bent over forward; Arjun’s hand on her back; being suddenly too hot for clothes; a splatter of blood on the floor, cleaned up; a nurse saying, “You know it’s real when they get naked”; Arjun saying, “You’re safe, I love you.”

More flashes. A lull. She was a living thing. Life must eat, must grow, must make more of itself. An imperative: _make more of itself._ Her body lunged at the imperative, hungered for it. Low sounds.

Something unbearable. Unbearable, imperative.

Something new.

—

When she woke up in the morning, Cotyar was gone and her head felt as if it had cracked open. There was an old, old story about that: a fully-formed goddess emerging from her father’s chiseled-apart skull. Trust men to equate a bad headache with childbirth.

She drank the glass of water that Arjun had left her. It was sunny, windless, warm. A good day to spend in the garden. She had finished dressing by the time her hand terminal buzzed, and picked it up absently, expecting a news alert. Instead, an encrypted message, its number blocked, its author unknown.

_Have information re: C.A. death. Know you are currently out of the loop. You want back in?_

She thought: _The tomatoes are starting to turn red._

She thought: _I want to know._

The chrysalis was empty. A skin with nothing inside it to fill out its curves, its lines and angles, does not reveal much about what left it behind. The thing had left its skin and she was not sure what it was.

She thought: _I need to know._

 _Yes,_ she wrote back.

—

Colonel Silvestri led her through a series of successively smaller and darker rooms, several of which were guarded by men dressed in black who did not wear identification of any sort. They did not look at her as she passed. “It wasn’t my idea to keep you out of it,” he said as they walked. “I wouldn’t have— I think if the UNN were trying to keep information about my kid’s death from me I’d burn the place down. I don’t know how you keep it together.”

She smiled at him. A tight smile. She felt it stretch her face in ways her face did not want to stretch. “A lifetime of practice,” she said.

Silvestri unlocked the last room. Inside a woman sat against the far wall. She was very thin. Her hands were cuffed in front of her and from the cuffs chained to the floor. Her hair hung limp over her eyes. She made no noise. In the corner was a small toilet. 

“She orchestrated the attack,” said Silvestri. “Martian-paid, OPA loyal. Internal investigation found about two dozen OPA operatives were involved, but they all answer to her. She calls the shots, even if she doesn’t pull the trigger.”

“What’s going to happen to her?”

The woman didn’t look up, but tension spread from her neck, down her shoulders, into a quick flex of fingers.

Silvestri pressed his lips together. “She’ll be interrogated. I don’t— I’m not involved in that part. They’ll figure out what they need to figure out. When they have, she’ll— We won’t need to worry about it.”

Chrisjen watched the woman. Stronger-boned than someone who had been born on a moon. A transplant? Martian? “Thank you,” she said to Silvestri. “I’ll need a moment.”

He nodded. “Knock when you need us.” The door behind him scraped. Old, simple, solid metal.

She stood and waited, then at last sat against the wall beside the door. The floor was cold, and the coldness seeped into her, until she imagined herself as solid and fragile as ice. Beneath the ice, something stirred, but it was so far away she couldn't make it out. A shadow, perhaps something with a tail.

“Ninety-seven days ago,” she said, “my son was killed on Callisto.” Her voice amazed her. She could have been talking about what to have for dinner.

The woman looked up at that. Her eyes were shells, revealing nothing about the living thing underneath.

“In case you’re curious,” said Chrisjen, “I haven’t been sitting here crying into my tea over it. He joined the Marines. Sometimes Marines die in the line of duty.”

The woman smiled. The smile curled into her eyes and became sharp-edged. “Five hundred and twenty-two days ago,” she said, “ _my_ son was killed on Callisto.”

They watched each other. Though neither moved, Chrisjen had the sense that they were circling, like dogs, waiting for the misstep, the seawater scent of blood. The thing that had broken out and left its skin clawed upward now, through the ice.

“You can’t have hoped to gain anything,” Chrisjen said.

The woman tilted her head to one side. The chain rattled. _How appropriately medieval,_ Chrisjen thought. The dark dungeon, the rattling chain. “There are six more Marines who won’t kill our children,” the woman said. She traced a finger along the edge of the cuff. “He died in the refinery. My son. They know it’s not unusual. There are regulations, but you of all people know how many ways there are to ask nicely for an exception, just this once. It’s cheaper—” her voice cracked. Her hands curled into fists, the nails biting. “It’s cheaper to pay out death compensation than to fix what kills people."

“The UN enforces regulatory law.”

The woman laughed, a rasping sound. “On Earth, maybe. You can’t be this naïve. You’re an Avasarala, right? Don’t they teach you how to take bribes in primary school?”

“I don’t—”

“Bullshit you don’t. Maybe you haven’t. You will. Earth must come first, right? We need the minerals they mine on Callisto, right? You pay every slug on Earth a basic income to lie underneath a bridge and hallucinate their life away, but God forbid the people doing the actual _work_ live long enough to—”

The woman’s pulse fluttered, just below her jaw. So much life flowing through such a narrow space. So close to the surface.

“Say one more fucking—”

“Avasarala. You think your father got rich from a career as a mid-ranking government official?”

“If you’re insinuating that my father is responsible for your son’s death, you’re either tremendously misinformed or actively suicidal, and I’m not sure I care which.”

“Of course he’s not responsible. Wouldn’t that be convenient. He kills my son, I kill yours.” She waved a hand. “Eye for an eye. No. But when you wanted someone to look the other way, you called him. When you wanted someone to disappear, you called him.” The woman smiled, and this time the smile softened something about her. “You could report this place, make sure I get a trial. You aren’t going to. I get it. Earth must come first. But the thing is, there are other things that are important. There are— Five hundred twenty-two days ago, I found out what was the most important to me.”

Chrisjen looked at her. The ice separated them now, thin enough to break with a finger. Hot breath clouded. She could sense the feathered crystals, the delicacy along their regular edges. Her hands ached where they pressed to the surface, hungry to push through.

“You’re right,” she said instead. “You’re right, I could. But fuck you. Fuck you and your equivocating, your moralizing, like lives are something to exchange. Your son died for nothing, and my son died for nothing, and you’ll die for nothing.”

She stood, and pounded three times on the door, and there was no sound behind her as she left.

—

“Is that you?” Arjun shouted from the kitchen. “I’m trying a new recipe. I’m not sure it’s turned out—come try?”

“I’ll be right there,” she said.

In the study, the photograph. The eyes not quite looking at the camera, as if the photo had been taken just before Charanpal had been ready. Next to it, the statue. She had seen it every day for decades, sitting patiently on her father’s desk, bearing the unbearable. She weighed it in her hand. Not as heavy as she might have expected, after all.

Not in here. In here, bits would get caught in the carpet, and be impossible to clean. The kitchen would be better, on the slate floor.

“I think it’s missing something. Maybe a squeeze of lime?” said Arjun, and then, “Chrisjen, what—” just before the statue hit. The sound of it, like water rushing, like wind in the grass.

Something startled awake in her. “I’ll clean it up,” she said, and Arjun said, picking his way around the shards, “No, no, I’ll clean it up, sit down,” and he held both her hands and said, “I love you, I love you, I’m so proud of you,” and she said, “I’m sure the dinner will taste fine, you’re such a good cook.”

—

She dreamed that night of a forest she had never seen. In the forest the trees grew tall and rapidly, chasing light. They had long needles that had dropped over the years and so the ground buoyed her and had a unnerving spring that deadened the sound of her footsteps. Nothing moved in the forest, nothing scampered, nothing sang.

Her heart lurched. She felt eyes on her, warm and distant like midwinter sun.

There were heartbeats in the forest. She heard them, the tiny thrum of a songbird, the rapid patter of a squirrel, the slow meter of an opossum, hanging utterly still. The trees had heartbeats, too, deep undulating pulses that echoed through the ground.

When she moved she made no sound. When she opened her mouth she made no sound. The screaming thing, the thing with claws, went silent at the sound of the heartbeats. The blood-scent.

Her hands were not her hands. Her hands had become the hands of a thing that stilled the forest. She heard a heartbeat, and the rabbit’s ribs split open like a book, and there was a hunger here. She thought: _I could._

—

In the morning, she woke with the sun and put on her gloves and went out to the garden. Arjun didn’t like the morning. He had grumbled when they first started seeing one another and it became apparent that compatibility in bed did not necessarily come along with compatibility about the matter of when to get into and leave it.

This morning, Cotyar was already in the garden, encouraging an exuberant squash to respect the personal space of its neighbors. She thought the tomatoes might be ripe, and stopped on the way to check on the eggplants, which had begun to round and darken.

Some of the tomatoes had fallen. Strange; they shouldn’t have; they weren’t quite ripe yet.

She went closer. No, not fallen. Picked. The tomatoes had been stripped from the vines. Something had taken a single bite from each unripe fruit, discarded it, and moved on to the next. A little string of _this one? no. this one? no._

It was only when Cotyar appeared at her side that she realized she was laughing. “I’m just imagining—” she couldn’t finish the sentence. The animal, whatever it was. Something small, furred. Prey. The thing in her howled, a keening cry that went on and on.

She needed to tell Arjun—something. She went in the house and washed her hands. She scrubbed at the cuticles, the slivers of soil under her nails. Arjun would still be asleep. She would wake him and tell him what she needed to tell him. The bedroom was quiet. She stepped out of her slacks, pulled her shirt off over her head. She shook with laughter, and Arjun turned over and said, “What are you—?”

“Hush,” she said, between giggles. “Hush.” She climbed into bed. Arjun laughed too, a low murmur against her.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Some little fucker ruined all the tomatoes,” she said, shaking with the hilarity of it, the audacity. The disappointment! A bite—not ripe; a bite—not ripe.

“It’s okay,” said Arjun, “It’s okay, love,” and she was still shaking, shaking, shaking. His arms came around her. “I’m here,” he said, “We’re still here.” They lay there for a long time while she shook. She thought: _Not ripe, not ripe._ His breath was soft on the back of her neck, warm. After a time, the shaking became tremors, and stilled, and her body was hers again. “My god, I’ve missed you,” Arjun said softly.

“I’m something else now,” she said.

He said, “I know.”

“I’m not sure what it is.”

A pause. “I know.”

“It’s not a good thing,” she whispered. “I don’t think— I’m not sure I—”

He was silent for a while. At last, he said, “Loss has a wider choice of directions than the other thing.” Then, wonderingly, "We're going to be _grandparents_. When did we get so old?"

—

On the day he was born, Charanpal opened his eyes slowly, curiously. The nurse said, “Oh look, he’s so alert. You’ve got a little firecracker there.”

Chrisjen said, “Welcome, welcome,” and Arjun, as always, spilled the tears that were dearer to her than blood. Something inside her wriggled into itself, wrapped itself against the winter of motherhood, safe from the dangers that stalked the woods.

—

Ambassador Jehan looked thoroughly out of place in a garden. She twisted the hem of her shirt between her fingers and carefully did not touch any of the plants as Chrisjen led her through the beds and invited her to sit.

“I understand you’re conducting an ongoing covert dialog with the OPA regarding union negotiations on Callisto,” Chrisjen said. As an introduction, it had the gratifying dual effect of setting Jehan on the defensive and draining the blood from her face.

“Let’s skip past the part where you say absolutely not, I say my source is sure, you ask who would lie about such a thing, and the whole tiresome bit until you eventually confirm what I already know.”

To her credit, Jehan said, cautiously, “That kind of dialog would be in violation of several diplomatic protocols.”

“Of course it would. The protocols exist so that you know what to deny having done. I’m not asking you here to rat you out. I need your help.”

“With what?”

The conversation prowled, quietly, the pacing steps of a leopard behind bars. “I was informed,” Chrisjen said, “that there were persistent and ongoing regulatory loopholes in UN oversight of Callisto mining and refinery operations.”

Jehan pressed her lips together and ran her hands over her knees once, fortifying. “That is likely the case.”

Chrisjen took a deep breath. “I want to close them,” she said.

—

Raúl brought one final gift. A rosebush.

Chrisjen looked at it dubiously. Bare-rooted, with eight thorny stalks lopped off at the ends, it looked like nothing so much as a particularly disgruntled sea urchin.

“It’ll be white,” he said. “I thought— White would be, you know.” He shuffled, jammed the hand that wasn’t holding the bundle in his pocket. “I’m being reassigned to a different store. Promoted. I think it’s a good move.”

“Thank you,” she said, and found she meant it. “I’m very happy for you. You know you’re always welcome here.”

“Yeah,” he said, on a rising tone, like he might follow it with something else. Instead, he said, “Yeah,” again, and set down the rose, and wrapped his arms around her.

—

Cotyar crouched at the edge of the garden, his hand resting lightly on the earth. As she watched, he curled his fingers into the soil, then slowly, soundlessly dropped to a seat. She joined him, sitting on the ground, her hands in her lap. He would speak when he was ready.

“I won’t be coming back,” he said. “Or not soon, anyway.”

“I don’t suppose—”

He gave a wry half-smile. “Of course I can’t.”

She nodded. “I had to ask. I’ll find out.”

“Of course you will.”

They lapsed into silence. The breeze brought the scent of pine, of loam, late-summer grasses crushed, sweet, gone to seed. “I thought you should know,” he said, softly, “that I would— That I would make the choice again. I can’t—obviously I can’t say why. And it’s a price I can’t repay. It cost something I can’t—”

“Stop it,” she said.

They were quiet again. “I can’t make it right,” he said.

On the second night of his life, Charanpal cried inconsolably. Brought to the breast, he nursed briefly to fuel more crying. He screamed at new diapers, swaddles, bouncing, rocking, white noise, light, darkness. He screamed at his mother and at his father, and Arjun looked at Chrisjen and said, “There’s a wheelchair in the hallway if you want to leave him here and make a run for it.”

She had laughed, and cried a little herself, and then laughed again at Arjun’s pantomime of checking the exits. “No one would blame us,” he whispered.

“Let’s take him out,” she said, and Arjun opened the sliding door to their balcony and set out a chair, pillows, blankets. He helped her limp out and settle gingerly onto a pillow. He brought out the crying child.

And something miraculous happened. Charanpal wrapped his hand around her finger, stared up at Luna, and stopped crying. “That’s our moon,” she told him. “We’ll go visit when you’re older.” He made a sound like a tire deflating and closed his eyes.

“We _made a person_ ,” said Arjun, peering at them, his eyes wide.

Chrisjen reached for the hand Cotyar had dug into the soil. She pulled it into hers, twining their fingers. Something inside her stretched, rolling long muscled shoulders, fangs gaping into a wide yawn and snapping together. “Come inside,” she said. “Arjun’s made lemonade. You must have time before you go.”

His hand shuddered, once, as if caught by a gust of wind. Then he squeezed and let go. “I have time,” he said.

**Author's Note:**

> Title from “Romance Sonambulo” by Federico García Lorca; "Loss has a wider choice of directions..." from “The Nails” by W.S. Merwin.
> 
> I’m aware that there’s a scene that aired live but was cut for streaming in which Chrisjen and Cotyar talk about not having seen each other since Charanpal’s funeral. I don’t like that, so I ignored it.
> 
> I'm also aware that Chrisjen supposedly has another child, but that character doesn’t (necessarily) exist in TV canon, so I opted not to have them exist here.
> 
> Come talk to me about space and interplanetary politics on [tumblr](http://drink-up-dreamers.tumblr.com/).


End file.
